Lighting a Fire of Possibility

When it began, it seemed as though anything was possible. It is like that, though, with beginnings: they can open out in so many different directions, go so many different routes, discover so many unknown new lands. There are whole worlds out there lying hidden waiting for some beginning to bring them into being from out of the shadows.

Beginnings, though, are not that easy to find. Why knows, who can say, what is a beginning? After all, so many things we think are beginnings turn out not to be beginnings at all they fade out and die before they start, like fires that never really take hold; smouldering and fading as the red sparks fade to grey ash.

Finding a beginning, though, a spark of possibility nestled deep in the protecting tinder of time waiting to catch light and for the first tentative flames to pull it out of hiding is a rare and precious thing.

So, when I turned that morning to find what seemed like a roaring fire of red hair caught in the dawn’s sunlight, lying there on the pillow next to me, I thought I’d found a new beginning bursting into flame right there in front of me.